Highlights from the 2012 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting and Exhibit
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Highlights from the 2012 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting and Exhibit www.mrs.org/spring2012
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he Materials Research Society boasted over 5400 participants attending 54 symposia—11 of which were co-sponsored by the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP)—at the largest Spring Meeting and Exhibit the Society has held yet. Meeting Chairs Lara A. Estroff (Cornell University), Jun Liu (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Kornelius Nielsch (University of Hamburg), and Kazumi Wada (University of Tokyo) convened the meeting on April 9–13, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. In-depth coverage of the technical talks and other meeting events is available at www.mrs.org/meeting-scene. Online proceedings are available as well at www.mrs.org/opl. Before the technical sessions began, Monday opened with a full day of activities ranging from tutorials and professional development programs to funding opportunities, to forums on the future of biomaterials and on materials and sustainable development. A number of “firsts” happened at this meeting: The inaugural Mid-Career Researcher Award, endowed by Aldrich Materials Science, was given to Kristi S. Anseth of the University of Colorado–Boulder. The first international MRS Student Chapter was announced at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Together with new chapters at the University of California–Davis, and the University of California–Irvine, that brings the total to 67 MRS University Chapters worldwide. Among the seminars held about funding available for materials research, this year saw expansions from the traditional government presenters regarding basic research to also include private foundations and some of the various government agencies involved in supporting applied research. And, for the first time,
a series of lectures and interviews were captured by video, now available online at www.mrs.org/s12-video. The Spring Meeting this year also introduced the topic of materials and sustainability, offering a day-long forum on “The many facets of sustainable development,” co-chaired by Ashley White, AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation, and Marty Green of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The forum also featured the official release of the special April 2012 issue of MRS Bulletin on “Materials for
sustainable development” (www.mrs. org/bulletin-april-2012). Green was a co-editor of this special issue, along with Laura Espinal of NIST, Enrico Traversa of the University of Rome, and Eric Amis of United Technologies Research Center. In his opening remarks at the forum, Green gave a brief history of the concept of sustainable development, maintaining that “sustainability is something you can approach but never achieve—it’s asymptotically approachable.” He said the Stone Age did not end because stones were depleted, but because society found something better. Today, he said, sustainable development is a balance between economic, societal, and environmental factors, and i
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